


Lost And Never Found

by ZeroMonster



Series: when we all fall asleep (where do we go?) [1]
Category: DCU
Genre: Choking and Stabbing, Dick Grayson is a Talon, Jason Todd is Red Hood, M/M, Temporary Character Death, jaydick-flashfic:cold case, relationship status:, you're the only motherfucker in this city who can hadle me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-15
Updated: 2019-09-15
Packaged: 2020-10-18 23:50:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,349
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20647739
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZeroMonster/pseuds/ZeroMonster
Summary: The Court of Owls sends its Talon to kill the Red Hood, Talon doesn't fail. That complicates things for Jason when he comes back.-Jason Todd dies. He stands tall upon the shores of hell and, shortly, it sends him back.





	Lost And Never Found

**Author's Note:**

> Dick was never Robin in this, he was taken by the court since his parents died so Jason doesn't know him.  
I wanted to go all in with the idea of Talon!Dick being sent to kill Jason...I'm so sorry?

> I want to know what to do
> 
> with the dead things we carry.
> 
> "This Morning the Small Bird Brought a Message from the Other Side" -Kingdom Animalia, Aracelis Girmay.

They’ve always said, when you feel a random shiver, that a rabbit has run across your future grave.

Jason Todd already has a grave, and when he came back he set fire to it. The cause of the shiver that starts at the base of his spine is no rabbit either. It actually looks more like an owl.

Red Hood receives a blow to the solar plexus from a clawed hand and spits blood, little droplets rain down over his assassin’s costume, red to his black and gold. Jason smiles.

“Do you feel alive?” He asks. The assassin stops, perhaps confused by the question. Jason doesn’t know if they’re a man, a woman or if they're even human, the only person he’s ever seen move that fast before is a speedster. 

“C'mon you have to feel it too.” But there are things that if you’re alive can’t escape you, and so they live in your bloodstream. “The violence,” he says. He_ reaches_ for the owl and his fist sends his head snapping back. “The hunger.” His muscles strain from the power he puts into the blows. “The terror.” The blank gaze of the owl mask stares back at him, the light of a dying street light winks in the gold rim of the googles, then extinguishes. 

“Red Hood, the Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.”

Jason narrows his eyes. Male, then. He aims for the head. 

The lights had gone out in the Mcloughlin Manor when the assassin had attacked him. Clara Mcloughlin was a very influential member of the upper Gotham world, a major player in the international business game. She was also the head of a human trafficking ring, people from all over the world disappeared to serve her in a project he still didn’t know the full details about, but he would find out once she was dead. He was going to blow the brains out of her blond head, but the Talon -because that's what he had to be- didn’t let him get that far.

_A Talon. _From the mythic Court of Owls! - A nightmare had chased him into the city outskirts and was trying to kill him. It was succeeding.

Back on the dark alley the bullets burrow into the pavement, so he gets the blades out and soon enough he’s shaking blood from them. _Little bird, if you can bleed you can be killed_. 

In the dark, the Talon is difficult to locate, and even more difficult to pin down, Jason doesn’t see a way out of this. His heart beats with genuine, crystalline fear and he _rages_, he uses every bit of training he has, less Batman and more Daughter of the Demon. 

He catches the Talon’s throat between his hands in a moment when he gets too close and doesn’t dance away fast enough. Before he can crush it, he feels the distinct pain of something sharp slicing through him and looks down to see the gold claws coated on his femoral blood. He feels instantly dizzy and his vision goes green with rage, he grips the Talon’s windpipe harder but he’s bleeding out fast and the owl can go a surprising amount of time deprived of air without blacking out. 

The next thing he knows, he’s on the floor and the Talon grips his head and smashes it against the concrete until the helmet shatters and hisses, the clawed hands grip and pull until the helmet is off and the Talon turns him on his back, instantly the hands are back, but this time they go for his throat. Maybe it means something that the assassin is trying to kill him in the same manner Jason had tried to finish him just a few minutes before, but all Jason can think is that he’s not going to die alone, he’s going to take the bastard with him. 

Jason grasps for something, hands clawing at the rough floor and he seizes a shard of the silicon carbide of his red helmet, a shard that broke away, and drives it into the Talon’s throat, a splatter of blood warms his hand. The body over him jolts but the hands around his throat only tighten, black fills his vision, his whole body burns. “You can kill me a hundred times, freak,” he rasps. “I’ll be coming -”

Back.

Jason Todd dies. He stands tall upon the shores of hell and, shortly, it sends him back. 

  
  
xxx

It feels like waking up from a dream; one that lasts days, weeks, but he’s probably been gone just for a few hours. It’s loud for a few seconds, like he’s in a crowded room and then it falls silent. His vision returns next, he opens his eyes to a water-stained ceiling, it’s fuzzy and then it gets too bright, forcing him to close his eyes, that’s when his body starts gaining feeling again and he shakes from the chill of the metal slab he’s resting on. He wakes up in the morgue. 

He was half-expecting to wake up in the Batcave. He doesn’t know what Bruce did with his body the first time he died - before putting him six feet under, that is - but for some reason that’s the place he thought he would end up. He’s lucky Batman’s in Atlantis. 

He’s even luckier the baby bats aren’t as efficient in Gotham’s way of spitting out casualties as the Dark Knight, and that they don’t know about Jason’s usual whereabouts. He doesn’t want them sniffing around this. Even Batman can't explain this

When he starts feeling his limbs again enough that he’s fairly sure he won't fall, he lowers himself to his feet gingerly and starts looking for clothes, preferably his, no need to left evidence for anyone to find. 

He’s planning on just walking out, there’s no one that can stop him, and it’s not like a body vanishing from the morgue is the strangest thing that’s happened in this hellhole of a city. The morticians will just think that some weirdo broke in and stole a body. 

Jason drags his feet toward the door, the pastel green walls make him sick. He wants to blow the whole building up, but that would definitely attract the attention of the batclan. They would start asking questions, demanding answers, so he just trashes the place, reinforcing the idea that someone broke in.

It’s night when he takes to the streets, obviously. He always comes back at night. The street lights outside die in a shower of sparks.

xxx

History demonstrates that Jason doesn’t take kindly to being murdered. It takes only hours for the gnawing inside him to turn into vicious biting and he starts prowling the streets in search for something he can’t name. He doesn’t find it. It’s a very bad night for the remnants of the Joker’s gang. 

Come morning he doesn’t feel like the metaphorical Pandora’s Box anymore, like every ugly thing wants to get out of his head. He feels well enough that he starts investigating why a bedtime story wants him dead, it’s obvious where he’s gotta start.

No one is there to stop him from kidnapping Mcloughlin, no more Talons, and he has to wonder if there are more than the one he killed. There must be, if the Court discovered how to make fighters like that, why would they stop at one? 

“Clara Mcloughlin,” he says with dark pleasure. “The Court of Owls has sentenced you to die.” 

It’s comical, how her eyes go huge with fear, they narrow in fury when he comes out of the shadows. 

“How dare you,” she snarls. “You cannot use the Court’s decree like that. I am the Orator, and you - you should be _dead_.”

“I was hoping you would say something like that,” he says before he knocks her out. 

Back in one of his safe houses, he takes off Mcloughlin’s gag.

“You won’t kill me,” she says, before going into a coughing fit. He doesn’t know why in the hell she would think that, but she’s right.

“I'm not going to kill you," Jason confirms. “I'm going to play a little game I like to call Scream In Pain Until You Answer My Fucking Questions.” 

What he finds - and oh boy, does he find plenty - is enough to make his blood run cold. “We’re everywhere.” Mcloughlin sneers. “Gotham’s history is our history, you can’t do _anything_, I’m going to run this detestable city -”

He snaps her mouth shut with his hand over her jaw. “The Talon,” he says, dangerously low. “Tell me everything about him.”

  
  
  
xxx

_Why the fuck, Bruce_, he thinks later, _do you have the file of a missing circus kid in your personal cold case data bank. _

Mcloughlin had called him the Gray Son, it took him three days and an infuriating number of dead ends to turn that name into an actual last name, and then to trace that to the reports of a murder in a circus seventeen years ago. What surprised him more than the fact that a circus was playing the front of a child rearing facility for assassins, was that Bruce Wayne was there the night the Flying Graysons fell. His adoptive father was caught in photos, placing a comforting hand over the shoulder of a dark haired kid. 

Jason had to hack the Batcomputer after that. 

No one at Haly’s Circus was allowed to get custody of Richard John Grayson, and a few days after his parents died, the kid disappeared from the group home he’d been placed into, they just assumed he’d ran away. Batman looked for him for _months_, obviously, he didn’t find anything. 

  
Red Hood tears apart Mcloughlin’s - the Orator of the Court of Owls - oversized house to find the correct laptop, he gets an in at the Court's records from there. There are videos - there are _fucking videos of kids_ in golden cages dangling from the ceiling, like nightingales in a bloody fairy tale. Jason learns a lot about the process of creating Talons; it turns out Richard’s coming to the Court had been so important it had required every part of his… transformation to be put on record. On the first video, a man wearing a white mask stylized as an owl and wearing thousands of dollars just over his shoulders, offers his hand to a nine year old Richard Grayson in front of another dozen masked figures, equally filthy rich.

“It is your destiny," the owl says. "It is your birthright."

The kid's obviously in shock, tear tracks run down his scraped face, his shirt is torn in places: five neat punctures proudly show he survived a Talon. 

Only to become one.

"What do you want?" Richard asks so low the microphone barely caught it. 

"To help you reach your true potential.” 

The kid looks up at the looming figure in front of him, Jason can see the exact moment he realizes he doesn’t have a choice.Richard raises his hand and glacially, as if waiting for someone to hurt him, he reaches up to shake the owl’s hand.

He decides the Orator has lived long enough.   
  


xxx

From the deepest room of his safe house, he can hear voices, and he unholsters his gun.

“-because those painful things weren’t pieces of you we took,” the Orator is saying, pleading. “They were gifts given. I can do so much more for you if you let me live.”

Jason’s finally able to look into the room and he’s not surprised to find a Talon there. But Talon is not freeing his master, instead he’s holding her up by the straps of her dress, pressing her against the boarded up window. There’s terror painted on her face.

Talon is bare faced: he's young, paler that the little kid, there's no emotion on his face. Talon leans down to talk to his prey, it’s almost intimate when he says, “If I push you...you will live a full life... while falling.”

Then he throws her through the window with so much force the boards break and she crashes through it, taking a nest of birds that was on the other side, glass and granite with her all the way down to the earth.

Talon turns around to Jason’s gun aimed between his eyes. Jason doesn’t know how Richard survived, and as if the Talon is equally confused, he cocks his head to the side, like a bird.

“I killed you,” Talon says.

“Yeah, must've been something you said,” Jason answers, it sucks that 80's musical references are wasted on undead Richard Grayson. “By the way,” he says, and shoots Talon through the throat. He goes down but doesn’t stay there, it’s too soon for any augmented healing factor to work before the wound is closing up and the Talon is back on his feet. 

“Fuck,” Jason exhales. “Take every bit of pain they gave you, and build your own demon, you, motehrfucking urban legend.” 

Talon disarms him and pins him to the floor, like a reflex, before frowning to himself. Jason watches as a shadow of emotion plays over his face. “You can’t die... you’re like me.”

Before Jason decides if he wants to argue that, Talon gets off of him and heads for the shattered window. He’s barefoot, Jason notices, and the shards of glass cut his feet, leaving a trail of blood over Jason’s floor, in the night's shadows it looks black. In the next second, he’s sailing through the air with a grace Jason didn’t know anyone could possess and he disappears into the night sky. Jason doesn’t really think about it before following after him. 

It’s a cold night. Next to the late Orator's body, the wind still moves a dead bird's feathers. The wind doesn't care that it can't fly because its dead, it just blows, lifting what it can.

Jason doesn’t care either.

**Author's Note:**

> I loved writing this so much so there's probably going to be more of it, you can scream at me until it happens.  
Title form I'll be comig, from low roar. Also, my usual poetry rec if you liked this: choking the devil back by donna lynch.


End file.
